The top 10 most dangerous toys of all time

We had lawn darts. Oh my God yes. Up at my family’s lake house in Idaho, every summer, I remember as a kid chucking these huge, beautifully deadly, lovingly aerodynamic things from the deck way out onto the lawn and watching them soar and fly and trying to hit… who the hell knows what. Driftwood. Grasshoppers. My sisters. I think they came with a set of large plastic hoops of varying sized and you tried to get the darts into the targets laid out on the lawn. Whatever.

It didn’t matter. The joy, of course, was in the chucking, especially when you were a strong but gangly kid and your big looping underarm throws were rather uncoordinated and hence sometimes the darts went about thirty feet straight up in the air and then swung around and were suddenly traveling about 4,000 miles an hour straight for your head, and you screamed and ducked and the giant metal dart went thunk into the ground not two feet from you, and you blinked and laughed and got up and did it all over again.

radarmagazine.com

Mmm, toxic

With four deaths and 6,700 reported injuries, I am proud to say my beloved childhood lawn darts (I never knew them as Jarts, but whatever) now reign supreme atop the Top 10 most dangerous play things of all time, according to Radar mag (not to be confused with obnoxious, noisy toys from hell, as discussed by the Gate’s own Dave Curran). I think I might’ve had something like the Creepy Crawlies Thingmaker, too (#7). Or something very much like it. I just remember tubes of chemical goo, scaldingly hot metal plates, weird rubbery stuff you really should not eat but probably did anyway, and much adorable toxicity. Or maybe those were Shinky Dinks. No wait, I distinctly remember hot rubbery goo. But who knows, my brain might be foggy from all those noxious childhood fumes.

Enjoy your soul-numbing Playstation 3, modern American kid. Pity you shall never know the raw, cathartic joy of defying death-by-lawn-dart. Now that’s ‘Merica.